More terror would certainly help the horror here

Skies

The standard-issue alien abduction thriller gains a few paranormal touches and a taste of the living dead in Dark Skies, a sometimes hair-raising riff on all the Communions that have come before.

It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

Yes, the aliens are abducting us, but only those of us who didn’t heed the warnings of Signs.

Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play struggling suburbanites — she’s a real estate agent, he’s an unemployed architect — who suddenly have weird lights, weirder noises, nightly kitchen rearranging and unseen threats to their two boys to go along with a battered marriage, long-term unemployment and a mortgage in arrears. Dark Skies is about how they and their confused kids handle all this.

Not very well, as you might expect.

Lacy (Russell) hears things and sees things. She’s at a loss to understand what took everything out of their kitchen cabinets and parked these things in precarious stacks, all the way to the ceiling. Daniel (Hamilton) is less credulous.

He’s fibbing to her about his job interviews, and she’s not telling him everything that’s going on at home, how little Sammy (Kadan Rockett) keeps having nightmares about The Sand Man.

The lies come out and the marriage earns its ugliest test when they come face to face with the impossible. The movie sinks or swims not on our belief that this is happening to them, but on the players’ beliefs, and neither adult gets frantic or worked up enough to be convincing.

At the very least, the first time Lacy spies a spindly alien from Signs standing over her child’s bed, her freakout should be epic. Both actors play muted shock, not panic.

And panic was called for.

As episodes pile up — catatonic fits, mass bird collisions with their house, strange bruising on their kids (Dakota Goyo is Jesse, the oldest) that has the neighbours sure they’re nutjob child-abusers, you’d expect a mania to set in.

Daniel and Lacy can only manage confusion, and solutions borrowed from Paranormal Activity (surveillance cameras), Night of the Living Dead (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie (Internet searches, where The Truth, or at least the conspiracy, is out there).

That last step delivers the movie’s most fascinating character, an “expert” (J.K. Simmons) on “visitations” whose resignation and exhaustion at their fate, which mirrors his, seems earned. Lacy and Daniel seem beaten before they start.

Visual-effects-man-turned-writer-director Scott Stewart has turned away from the Legion and Priest D-movies with their angels and vampires and patched together something of an expertly shot and cut mashup here. He’s very good at managing tension, and the script doles out the requisite shocks at decent intervals.

But what’s missing is that Insidious empathy, the sense of parents terrified for their kids, a terror that the viewer should and would share — if only we’d been given more reason to care or a surer sense that they do.